There don’t seem to be very many pigeons in Ann Arbor (or what pigeons there are have been cruelly maimed in glue traps, as a story in today’s Ann Arbor News reports; why didn’t the pig who dreamed up the glue traps just get out his rifle and shoot the things instead of torturing them?). In the Bay Area they...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Boppin’ through New Mexico with some tunes … Soundtrack, day three Ella Fitzgerald: The Best of the Song Books and Windham Hill Sampler ‘84. And Sixteen Horsepower’s Olden. Also Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. And...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I think that Day Three was my favorite part of our trip. The weather was gorgeous with curtains of rain over I-40; the temperatures were great for August and I was able to step...

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[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Fabulous New Mexico … Laguna, NM A hamlet about 45 miles due west of Albuquerque on Interstate 40, Laguna was the next place we stopped before hitting the bigger cities of northern New Mexico...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Gallup is quite the town … Gallup, NM Population 20,209 (2000 census). Founded 1881 as a stop on the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad by David L. Gallup. Home to the Gallup Cultural Center and...

Finally broke down and watched “Party Girl,” that strange little 1995 cult flick with Parker Posey as a Manhattan clubhopper who is inexplicably and fanatically converted to the religion of Melville Dewey overnight (and whose love interest is a Lebanese falafel vendor who secretly yearns to be a teacher). A very odd artifact in spots, with a wildly uneven tone,...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] One of my favorite spots in the southwest … our next destination, post-grad school? Flagstaff, AZ Population 52,894 (2000 census). Seat of Coconino County. Elevation about 7000 feet. Home to Lowell Observatory and Northern...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Day Two of our trip, as I remember it, was really pretty nice, with the possible exception of traffic and crowds in Las Vegas. The weather was beautiful and rainstorms swept across the Mother...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] This is where you need XM satellite radio … Soundtrack, Day Two Lots of jazz and fading-in-and-out talk radio on poor-reception stations. Popped in John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things and Miles Davis’s Kind of...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I still haven’t quite figured out how to pronounce ‘Tonopah’ … is it ‘TOEnuh-pah’? or ‘tuh-NO-puh’? or ‘toe-noePAH’? Whatever it is, I’m sure it means ‘Middle of Bum-F—- Egypt’ … And thus begins our...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I know that that’s one big-ass dam, lemme tell ya! Hoover Dam National Historic Landmark (NV/AZ) Built at a total cost of $165 million between 1931 and 1936, the Hoover Dam is 726 feet...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Wild, woolly Las Vegas. Whatta complete hoot. So very unreal and otherworldly … Las Vegas, NV Population 478,868 (2000 census). Seat of Clark County. The first settlement at what is now Las Vegas was,...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Hitting the road with some tunes and enjoying the countryside. I love it … Soundtrack, Day One John Cougar Mellencamp’s Scarecrow. Obviously out-of-date yet somehow appropriate. Then a Columbia compilation called The Golden Age...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Yosemite is grand, but go when the crowds aren’t there: fall and spring. Spring is best, because the waterfalls are full and gorgeous … Yosemite National Park, CA Population: a bunch of park rangers...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Tonopah (I still don’t how to pronounce it properly) is the very definition of ‘Middle of Nowhere’ … Tonopah, NV Population 2627 (2000 census). Seat of Nye County, the third-largest county in area in...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I remember very little about even going through this town … Oakdale, CA Population 15,503 (2000 census); founded 1871 by the Stockton & Visalia Railroad Company; main attractions Hershey Foods Corporation and Oakdale Cowboy...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Frank’s last day in California/first day on the road … Dottie’s True Blue Cafe My morning began at 7.45. I took care of whatever last minute things I could think of. This included imposing...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I still haven’t quite figured out how to pronounce ‘Tonopah’ … is it ‘TOEnuh-pah’? or ‘tuh-NO-puh’? or ‘toe-noePAH’? Whatever it is, I’m sure it means ‘Middle of Bum-F*** Egypt’ … Happy Trails ‘Til We...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Moving Day. Yegods. Whatta day that was. Exhausting. Near tears. Panic attacks. Loading that big truck. My last night in San Francisco. Facing the wrenching goodbye where Bayley and I had to say goodbye...

We left the Bay Area a year ago today. Just loaded ourselves and the beagle into the Jeep, drove, and by the end of the afternoon, we were over the Nevada border. Hard to believe it’s been that long. I still miss aspects of SF and the Bay Area, but it’s all essentially memory and history to me now, which...

I gave up my last vestige of California-ness this week: I broke down and overcame whatever denial I was living in for the past year and finally got a Michigan driver’s license. (I have had a valid California license this entire year, so don’t assume that I was driving illegally or anything like that. Anyway, the number of times in...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] No comment here. We DO miss them all … So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu! ‘Don’t say goodbye, say see ya soon!’ Goodbyes are hard … Kit, Erin, Me and Frank and the girls,...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Well, I do miss BART when I have to deal with the drivers around here … but I don’t miss its expense, dirt, filth and crazy, weird people. And there are better pizza joints...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Ah! The anxieties of the final hours before a major move! God! I’m glad we’re not going through this right now!!! 30 Hours and Counting This is just going to be short update tonight....

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Tunes on the road … Soundtrack, Departure Heard Art Pepper’s “Summertime,” one of the sublimest West Coast tunes you could ever listen to, on a jazz station when Steve was driving me home tonight...

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August 12 and it’s 59 degrees outside. Astounding.

I was walking to the bus tonight, with my usual combination of focus on the path in front of me and absorption in my own thoughts, when to my right I suddenly heard a woman raising her voice and asking, “Do you speak English?” (It was more of an exclamation than it was a question.) It turned out to be...

According to the National Weather Service, July 27 was a record low maximum temperature for this region: The high temperature reached just 64 degrees…falling well below the record low maximum for the date of 70…set way back on July 27th 1874. Adding insult to injury…the high of 64 degrees occurred just after midnight! Temperatures hovered in the mid 50s to...

The weather this month has been amazingly, well, temperate. There was a bit of mugginess in the air this afternoon, but nothing that was even remotely oppressive. It was actually cooler outside this afternoon than it was indoors. And the cloud cover rolled in later in the day, with the nightfall taking on a signs-of-a-thunderstorm cast. There is something very...

I haven’t made much comment about the marriage thing lately because, frankly, it’s too exhausting to keep up, and it’s dispiriting to see what lengths the right wing will go to in order to cloak their efforts to destroy gay peoples’ lives in the rhetoric of “preserving the family” (when the measures they are pushing do no such thing, but...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] A year later, these seem pretty inconsequential things to be missing … I had mostly forgotten all about them. San Francisco Scenes I Will Miss Things I will miss about living in this San...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] A year later, I STILL definitely do not miss these things … San Francisco Scenes I Won’t Miss Things I won’t miss about living in this San Francisco neighborhood: The higgledy-piggledy and dangerous intersection...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] If I remember right, the beagle was very upset that we moved down the hall to my roommate David’s new apartment for the week before we departed for Michigan. He sulked under my bed...

I’ve been so laid up with carpal tunnel (and thank you Hillary, Michael and Dorothea for your wonderful advice and care, I do appreciate it) that I really dropped the ball on an important milestone for aSquared AirBeagle: Happy Birthday to Us! We’re a year old! Because all of those entries are from my trashed Movable Type installation, I don’t...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Many mega-dittoes from me on this one … Things I’ll miss (not) Within the space of fifteen minutes just after 7:30 on Monday morning, within a block of the center of the Financial District,...

We went to see “A Home at the End of the World“ last night at the Michigan. The screening was introduced by Tom Hulce, best known for his performance 20 years ago in Milos Forman’s “Amadeus.” The movie wasn’t all that great; it was brief, the ending was very abrupt, and probably the only really two fantastic things about the...

I can’t believe how great it is that the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority has finally gotten with the program and is starting to allow people with University of Michigan IDs to ride the bus without paying. (There were one or two free routes before this, but citywide is a godsend.) I’m saving easily $8-10 a week.

I’m no paragon of the spoken word, as anyone who knows me can verify, but it always amuses me when I hear students — not just undergrads, grads and everyone in between — using filler words in their speech. “Like” I can understand; it’s an unconscious filler word, like “um,” “uh,” and all the rest. But today I listened to...

This afternoon while I was waiting for the bus, I saw a couple of undergrad-looking guys, one toting what looked like a box containing a router and the other some other kind of electronic doohickey in a Toshiba box, and knew beyond a doubt that the influx has officially gotten into high gear. The students have been traipsing around campus...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Well, it looks like this one saw me full of anxieties about leaving San Francisco for Ann Arbor: Overwhelmed Scenes from a farewell dinner for Frank with his colleagues: A lovely scene tonight as...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I have to admit to being a snob here; I always preferred SF to Oakland, which never really grew on me, its storied past notwithstanding … A note about Oakland It may seem that...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Fog. Oh, the fog. Yes, indeedy, god knows I do miss that … Things I’ll miss, #8 The fog. It doesn’t come in on “little cat feet,” as in the Carl Sandburg poem. It...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I do miss the ease of BART … no cars, no traffic, you can sleep or read the paper or cruise hot guys, er, I mean, relax on the way to Oakland … Things...

I was walking along William today and a man sitting on his porch was blasting what sounded an awful lot like Billie Holiday out one of the front windows of his house. Ah, summer.

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] The stairway walks are fabulous, but they totally kick your ass … Things I’ll miss, #6 Stairway walks. San Francisco has more than 350 stairways, some of them obvious landmarks like the Lyon Steps,...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Mitchell’s is pretty fabulous and we haven’t really found anything to equal it around AA, as of yet. Anyone have suggestions? Things I’ll miss, #5 Mitchell’s Ice Cream. I had tasted Mitchell’s but today...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] Oh yeah, I remember views. Unlike here in pancake country … Things I’ll miss, #4 The views. There are spectacular views in San Francisco that you won’t see anywhere else in the world. This...

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.] I have to say that there are fabulous book stores around Ann Arbor, so I don’t miss these probably as much as Frank … Things I’ll miss, #3 Green Apple Books. Haven’t ventured out...